The Boy Who Drew Monsters

by Keith Donohue

  Long time ago. Now Nick was here, the real Nick, for a whole week. A few more days and it would all be over. He wanted Nick to stay, but the monsters were already here. It had taken all day for his parents to stop talking about the bones in the hole. He could have told them where the rest of the skeleton went. He would have said dig deeper, but now it didn’t matter. The paper with the skeleton bones was in the fire.

  They had stayed up late, the four of them, with hot cocoa and popcorn and a movie on TV, and over the hours, his parents’ worries melted away. His father laughed at some silliness on the show. His mother stopped fretting and was nodding by the fire before she declared universal bedtime and off they all went. The mood, if not festive, had certainly improved from the anxiety of the afternoon. The boys brushed their teeth and put on their pajamas and went to his big warm double bed. Mommy and Daddy’s old bed, first bed, and now his own. They were still awake when the adults finished getting ready and the lights went out all over the house.

  In the dark, they whispered to each other.

  “Do you miss them?”

  Nick drew out a sigh. “My parents? No, I guess I don’t. Maybe later, but not now. Parents always think you are going to miss them, but they don’t know that sometimes you wish they would just leave you alone.”

  “I wish my parents would go away,” Jack Peter said. “Instead of me.”

  “You would miss them if they went away for good.”

  “Like you miss the baby.”

  Nick did not answer but rolled over to stare at him. How did Jack Peter know he had been thinking about Baby?

  Kicking off the comforter, Jack Peter slid out of bed and walked to his desk and turned on the table lamp. The light seemed to scream against the darkness, but he sat quietly and began to draw. He worked quickly and with great purpose.

  “What are you doing?” Nick called from the bed. “We’ll get in trouble if your parents see the light under the door.”

  “I need to make something before I forget,” Jack Peter said. He dashed off the drawing in minutes and scampered back to bed. In the closeness of the room, they soon fell asleep as if drugged.

  * * *

  At three in the morning, the baby began to cry. The sound came from far below and outside, persistent as a cat yowling on a fence, but Nick heard it clearly enough over the constant ocean. Unholy as a siren, the baby’s cries rode the wind and wound their way into the room. Beside him, Jack Peter did not move, even as the clamor drew nearer, and Nick was tempted to wake him or bang on the door to the room where Mr. and Mrs. Keenan slept so they might hear what he heard and come to his rescue. But he did no such thing. He lay in bed beneath the comforter, stiff as a bug on a pin.

  The baby did not bawl continuously but would stop and start again, each time louder than before, so that it seemed to be getting closer and closer. Nick pulled up the covers and waited helplessly in the darkness. With his foot, he nudged Jack Peter on his bum, but it was like trying to wake the dead. The body shifted slightly and then rolled back into the soft trough in the mattress. Not that his friend would have been of any use. Despite Jack Peter’s presence next to him, Nick felt desperately alone.

  A gentle drumming noise made him uneasy, and he squeezed his eyelids tight so he could listen without distraction. He thought it might be the sound of hail or sleet against the side of the house. He could be hallucinating, as his mother had said about the bodies in the closet, conjuring a figment in his imagination, mistaking something quite innocent for something more sinister. Stepping from the bed, he felt the warmth of the braid rug give way to the chill of the wooden floor. The crying had stopped, and he felt it safe to go to the window to investigate, holding his breath as he approached. The shape of a tiny hand swiped across the bottom of the glass. He waited for it again, convinced that his eyes were playing tricks. Impossible. He pressed his nose against a pane, resting his forehead on the sash. No snow was falling that night, and the bright moon shone over the Atlantic, casting faint light across the waves, illuminating the rock faces upon the shore. He could see there was nothing out there, nothing to fear, and for a moment, he wondered if the noises had all been in his head. Just as he was about to turn away from the window, a fleeting motion above his head, no more than a passing change of light, convinced Nick to look out again.

  The glass clinked when he forced open the sticky window, and something scratched against the clapboard overhead. Nick stuck his head through the opening and into the dark night. The frosty air smacked him in the face. He had forgotten how high up the second story was from the ground. His vertigo made him feel as if he was going to pitch forward out of the window and plummet into the sand below, but the dizziness gave way to shock at what he saw clinging to the side of the wooden clapboards. Babies, darting away on all fours in jerky bursts and hesitations, a swarm of babies, scuttling on the surface like silverfish across a page. Defying gravity, defying reason. They were familiar but strange, almost alien with their bald round heads, and they paid little heed to him, other than moving away and considering him with odd backward glances from a safe distance. Their bodies were soft and naked, their faces cold and inhuman, their eyes black as holes. One opened its toothless mouth and out came a harsh mechanical cry, and when it screamed, Nick screamed back at it. The thing crawled right for him, and Nick pulled himself in and banged the sash against the windowsill. The sickly pale creature streaked across the glass. Jack Peter was sitting up in the bed, wide-eyed and rapt at what he was witnessing, but he gave no sign of help or comfort. Nick screamed again and ran from the room.

  * * *

  When she heard the window slam and the boy cry out in the middle of the night, Holly was already awake, as though her unconscious mind had anticipated trouble. Her sleep had been fitful for weeks now, and as she opened her eyes, Holly was sure that she had not slept at all that night. And so she was not dreaming of those sounds outside, babies crying far away, or that Nicholas, too, had heard them and was now in a panic. As usual, Tim was comatose, sleeping deeply as ever. He did not revive when she hoisted herself out of bed, and he did not wake when she stepped into the hallway and threw on the light. The poor child was shivering, hunched in a corner.

  “Nicholas, what’s the matter? Did you have a bad dream?”

  Like a rescued cat, he sprang to his feet and leapt into her embrace, putting his arms around her waist and pulling himself so tightly against her body that she could feel his bones pressing her bones. Sense memories rushed into her, the feeling of her own child in her arms before he had grown too distant and reserved, and the force of Nicholas’s faith and reliance nearly made her weep. His spindly body was crushing her, leaving her breathless. She resisted this surge of need and then gave in, mothering the child next to her breast, fiercely holding on to him.

  “My goodness,” she said. “Whatever’s gotten into you?”

  Sobbing, he burrowed deeper into the safety of her arms.

  “Did you have a nightmare? Did Jack Peter do something to you? Did he hurt you?”

  At the mention of his friend’s name, Nick let go of her and covered his eyes with a free hand. She hung onto him, searching his face for clues.

  “There’s something out there.”

  “What, Nicholas, what? You can tell me.”

  “They were crawling like lizards on the walls. Babies.”

  An involuntary laugh filled her with instant regret. She pulled him closer as though to apologize.

  “They were just outside, all over the house, and I got scared. Didn’t you hear them crying?” Tears welled in his eyes.

  Holly licked her dry lips before answering. “You say you heard noises out there, from the ocean?”

  “Crying. Loud like a baby. And then I went to the window to see what it was. I’m sorry I opened it and let the cold in, but I had to see what was making that noise. That’s when I saw the baby monsters. They turned their heads and looked at me like bugs. And then they scooted away for a minute. Stopping and thinki
ng what to do. When they came back toward me again, I got out of there.”

  “What was Jack Peter doing this whole time?”

  Nick paused, considering whether he should tell on him. “Just watching me.”

  “We have to go see if he’s all right,” she said, and together they opened the door to his bedroom.

  Light from the hallway threw a rectangular shaft across the foot of the bed. Sprawled beneath the covers, Jack Peter slept soundly. The windows were shut and the curtains drawn. Going past the bed, Holly speculated what she might do if Nicholas was right, if there was something out there clinging to the walls. The boy followed, several steps behind, shielded by her nightgown.

  Facing the sea, the old wooden window frames were swollen and difficult to open. She maneuvered her shoulders so that she could give one good hard push and was thrown off balance when the window opened as smoothly as the door. A blast of icy air gave her goose bumps, and in came the smell of the salt water and the everlasting sound of the surf. Out there in the sand between the rocks was a grave full of sailor bones. In the bed, Jack Peter muttered and curled beneath the blankets, and Nicholas crept one step closer to her. For a moment, Holly considered asking him to hold onto her waist, but realized that it might be more likely that they would fall together if she slipped. Grabbing onto the sash, she ducked her head and passed it through the opening into the night.

  There were no babies, no monsters, no giant lizards crawling on the outside of the house, not that she suspected there might be, but still, a faint disappointment clouded her thoughts. Holly knew she had to make a show for the boy, however, and so searched carefully in every direction, shifting her position to better see. Her hair blew across her face, and she was as cold as a stone. Nothing to be seen, so she pulled herself back inside and closed the window with defiance.

  “I heard something out there, too, but I’m glad to say, Nicholas, whatever you might have seen is gone. Perhaps you just had a nightmare?”

  “No, they were there, crawling like lobsters.”

  The boy in the bed grunted and rolled over.

  Holly gathered Nick in her arms and led him into the patch of light by the door. “You’re upset, I know, and a little scared and I don’t blame you. Lots of strange goings-on around here lately. How ’bout you come sleep in my bedroom, I’ll make a bed on the floor out of some blankets and a pillow, and you’d be safe as a kitten. I’m sure Mr. Keenan wouldn’t mind, and maybe then we could all get some sleep. And then it will all seem different in the light of morning.”

  “What about Jack Peter?”

  When was the last time their son had come to their room to be comforted in the middle of the night? Surely not since he had become an inside boy. But perhaps just earlier, she could not remember when exactly, there was a time when his fear or lonesomeness overwhelmed his reluctance for human contact. Five years old. Four? She sat on the bed next to her son and said his name, softly so as to not alarm him. He fussed, and then she was uncertain as to whether he really had been sleeping or if he had been pretending. Holding his hand over his eyes to shield against the hall light, he sat up in the bed. The hair on the left side of his head stuck up like a wild mane, and he yawned like a lion, a magnificent stretch spiked with teeth.

  Speaking in a whisper, she asked, “Did you not hear Nicholas shouting and then leave the room? Didn’t you hear the noise outside? What were you doing in all this commotion?”

  “I was sleeping. Why did you wake me up?”

  She resisted the urge to smooth his mussed hair. “Nicholas had a fright, and he’s going to come sleep in my room, and I wanted to let you know in case you woke up in the night and wondered what had happened to him.”

  “No,” Nick said. “It’s okay now. I’ll stay here.”

  He stared at the floor when she tried to look in his eyes, and she could hear the embarrassment in his voice. “Nicholas—”

  “It’s fine, it’s all right, I just need to go back to sleep. Could you just leave the door open a bit and the hall light on?” He climbed into bed next to Jack Peter and rolled away from her. For a few minutes, she stood like a statue in the middle of the room, watching and listening as they settled themselves. Miniature men, desperate to be brave.

  “What was it?” Jack Peter asked.

  “Nothing. Just a dream like she said.”

  She hoped that they would ask her to stay, but they had no more use for her, so she left the room and went back to her own bed. No more babies crying in the darkness, no more little boys curling in her arms.

  ii.

  Holly read the names of the dead. Names that had not been spoken in ages, whispering each spirit to herself. The archivist at the Maritime Museum had brought her a gray box filled with old letters and ledgers, reports of several shipwrecks off the coast of Maine, and she eventually found the list on a water-stained sheet of lined paper, the account written in the beautiful cursive hand of some anonymous nineteenth-century scribe:

  Drowned on the Porthleven, 29 Dec. 1849

  Very Rev. Thomas Vingoe 51 yrs and wife Mary

  David, Thomas & Mary, children of T & M Vingoe

  Bodies taken by Friends

  James Chenoweth, 28 yrs, taken by Friends

  Edward Conklin, 18 yrs old

  Unknown Female child about 9 yrs old

  Mathew Jones, wife & two infants (wife & 1 child not found)

  Mr. Purcell (Captain)

  Bodies not found

  John Nance and his son, about 7 yrs old

  Sir Charles Arundell

  James Mayhew

  T. Clark

  Sailor (stranger) originating from Helston, about 30 yrs

  Bodies not found. They could be out there still, she thought, just beyond our house, and that bone could be from one of those poor children. The tick of the big clock in the room filled her ears. Nobody else haunted the library that morning. She was tempted to slip the beautiful old page from the folder and into her purse as evidence to bear out her suspicions, but instead carefully wrote out each name on a small pad. Bodies taken by Friends.

  The library was cold, as if they were conserving heat with so few patrons, and Holly blew on her fingers to bring some life back to her hands. She had been led to these files, she thought, from the moment she first saw the painting in the priest’s dining room, and the voices, the bones, even Tim’s phantoms in the night all pointed to the Porthleven. And maybe those ghosts had infected her son with this obsession with monsters. She thought of Jack’s strange detached look when she had gone in to check on the screams coming from his room. And Nicholas, that poor trembling child she had abandoned the night before. She should have insisted he sleep with them, Tim be damned, rather than let him spend the long dark hours with Jack and who knows what they might have conjured in their late-night whispers, all their constant monsters. They had been careful to hide their notebooks filled with creatures, but she had found them out. Pages of horrors from the movies and television, and Jack’s burnt skeleton. She would speak to them that afternoon, recommend a change of subject for their artistic endeavors. Still life or landscapes. Or cars, didn’t ten-year-old boys love to draw cars and tanks and airplanes? The kids had taken a wrong path that week, and she was determined to correct matters, if only so the Weller boy would agree to come back someday and not be so frightened that he would stay away forever, like a mind-blown visitor who flees screaming from a haunted house never to return. That would be a disaster for her son.

  But who could blame Nicholas, really? The Wellers had been good friends and neighbors, virtually insisting that the two boys remain friends no matter what. They never spoke of it as a chore or obligation, but Holly suspected that they were proving to themselves how decent and generous they could be with their son’s time. For just one week, Nick was her responsibility, and here she was about to deliver him back as damaged goods. When she held him against her breast last night, she could feel his heart beating like a jackrabbit’s. Now in the library, she he
ard that ticking rhythm, constant and familiar as the patterns of her own breathing. Like someone knocking on her brain. What did the spirits want from her? Why were they trying to reach her family?

  Heading down Highway 1 for home, Holly had the urge to study the Wreck of the Porthleven again. Now that she had the names of the dead, the shipwreck had become more vivid in her imagination. The Reverend Vingoe and his three small children, the Nance lad, the unnamed sailor, and the unknown girl. Perhaps they simply wished to be named and remembered. The painting would give her an even stronger sense of the events surrounding that terrible night and why the ghosts were haunting her. Father Bolden had looked perplexed when she had brought the matter up on Christmas eve, and now she rehearsed an explanation of her interest in the painting, playing up the local history angle, and isn’t it interesting what can be found in the archives? By the time she reached the Star of the Sea, she nearly had her story straight.

  The housekeeper answered the door, bowing slightly in greeting, and Holly reached out to shake her hand.

  “Mrs. Keenan, how nice to see you.” With a firm grip, she pulled Holly into the foyer. “I’m sorry to say that Father Bolden is out, but please come in. I was hoping to see you, and here you are.”

  “I’ve done some research,” Holly said. “Found some details about the Porthleven that he might be interested in.”

  Miss Tiramaku took Holly’s coat and then led her into the dining room, moving quickly as if she owned the place. “I was going to bring a little something to your house when Father came back. Something for your troubles. Just wait right here…”